Making films was a little like a grown-up version of the game. Let’s pretend to be a girl called Alraune; a creature consumed by bitterness and surrounded by dark sexuality…
Alice knew, with the logical, sensible part of her mind, that Alraune was not real. She knew that Alraune was a being forged from dark dreams and subterranean myths; and that she had been born out of a writer’s macabre fantasies.
‘But I don’t think,’ she said to Conrad, ‘that I should like to meet that man, that Hanns Heinz Ewers who created Alraune’s story. I suppose he’s long since dead; the original book was written years ago, wasn’t it? In 1911 or 1912.’
‘He is not dead, and I think he still writes a little,’ said Conrad. ‘Most of his work is as dark and as – as uncomfortable as Alraune.’ He paused, and then said, ‘I think he has campaigned quite strongly for the German cause, and I believe he is a supporter of the Nazi Party and Herr Hitler.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with that, though, is there?’
‘No,’ said Conrad slowly. ‘No, of course not.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The irony was that while the film-makers’ money solved one set of problems, it set up a whole new set of difficulties of its own. Alice Wilson, that sheltered English girl, had never in her life seen a bank cheque, and when the first one was given to her, at first she had no idea how to deal with it. Her parents had said banks were not for such as them; servants were paid their wages on each Quarter Day in the year, as was right and proper, and their own tiny pension was brought to them on the first of each month by his lordship’s agent, who counted it out on the kitchen table and then made them sign a piece of paper. Alice’s mother had always maintained that it was not for women to know about money; Alice had found this slightly exasperating at the time, but looking back she found it rather sad.
In Miss Nina’s employment she had been paid the princely sum of ￡40 a year, ten shining sovereigns on each Quarter Day, together with a Christmas gift of two dress lengths of cloth, one of wool, one of muslin, and a stout pair of leather shoes. This was all that any servant, fed and housed and wanting for nothing, could possibly need or expect. But now Alice would have to deal with banks whether she wanted to or not, because the film people assumed she had a bank account into which she would pay their cheques. They also expected her to sign what Alice uneasily suspected to be legal documents – contracts and agreements requiring her to act in a specific number of films for them over the next two years. This was gratifying, but it was also worrying. She could not possibly sign her real name to the contracts, but she was afraid that signing her false name might constitute the committing of a crime.
In the end she took the problem to Conrad, who said, Pouf, it was a matter easily dealt with. He took her to the offices of a discreet Viennese lawyer who drew up something called a Deed Poll that made her new name legal. She could be called anything she liked, said the lawyer, and once the appropriate documents were signed and witnessed, all would be entirely legal and proper.